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CyberAgent is one of Japan’s largest Internet and media companies. It maintains a social network platform called Ameba, which hosts its popular Metaverse game, called “Ameba Pigg,” where users create an avatar and live a virtual life.

As an Internet leader, CyberAgent tasked Ameba Pigg Infrastructure Engineer, Akihiro Kuwano, to pioneer a new architecture that would overcome the following challenges:

Retaining users. A single second of load time, when it interferes with game play, can prompt gamers to stop playing a game. Ameba Pigg’s database had to handle millions of daily requests, including peak loads in the morning and evening of 60,000 queries per second, without perceptible slowdown.

Scalability. Ameba Pigg was experiencing tremendous growth. Akihiro needed to design a system that could continue to scale as its popularity grew.

Cost efficiency. Traditional scale-out systems carried significant and continually growing capital and operating costs. The new system had to grow performance without corresponding increases in costs.

It seemed a daunting task, but Akihiro knew he could find a solution.

The Solution

Akihiro told his OEM sales representative that Ameba Pigg’s extremely high-volume traffic patterns required the lowest possible latencies for top performance. The representative pointed him to SanDisk’s Fusion ioMemoryTM solutions. After testing the Fusion ioMemory ioDrive® cards, Akihiro knew he had his solution.

Innovating for Growth and User Retention
Ameba Pigg’s existing database was a MySQL Key-Value Store (KVS) database composed of 100 custom-built machines. It was reaching its performance limit. On top of this, the custom servers were not very reliable, so continuing to scale out the system meant much more maintenance work. Akihiro’s team decided a new SanDisk-powered MySQL system would deliver much better performance using far fewer standard enterprise servers.

Akihiro’s team tested the performance of the ioDrive cards by comparing a single disk-based MySQL database server against a single SanDisk-powered MySQL server. The disk-based server achieved 10,000 queries per second, while the SanDisk- powered server increased the database load capacity to 35,000 queries per second.

MySQL Queries per Second

With SanDisk

Without SanDisk

3.5x

Improvement

"Over the last six months of using the ioDrive card-based system, our site traffic has doubled and we still haven’t seen any performance problems. Scaling performance will be easy, and we have immediate plans to purchase more Master/Slave pairs to support continued growth."

Akihiro Kuwano,
Infrastructure Engineer, CyberAgent

Akihiro said, “We estimate the ioDrive card-based system can support between 80,000 to 100,000 queries per second before CPU bottlenecks start to limit performance. We have doubled the number of users on our application without any performance slowdown. We no longer worry about gamers losing interest due to poor performance.”

Scalability and Reliability
While performance was critical to user retention, the system also had to scale as the game’s popularity grew. It also had to deliver enterprise reliability under 24x7x365 loads.

The SanDisk-powered system made this easy. It delivered the following:

Akihiro couldn’t be happier with the SanDisk-powered system. He said, “Over the last six months of using the ioDrive card-based system, our site traffic has doubled and we still haven’t seen any performance problems. Scaling performance will be easy and we have immediate plans to purchase more Master/Slave pairs to support continued growth.”

About CyberAgent

CyberAgent America is a leading developer of social games and online entertainment communities. As a fully owned subsidiary of Tokyo based CyberAgent, CyberAgent America utilizes extensive networks and over 11 years of experience in the Japanese internet industry to bring Japanese internet services into popular social media destinations online, helping users worldwide connect online and create real experiences. By taking advantage of synergies between the companies within the CyberAgent group, CyberAgent America leads the way for Japanese Internet services’ international expansion.